Should Californians Vote to Redistrict and Combat the Lone Star State's Fire with Fire?
What, precisely, is the role of Congress? During another presidency of Donald Trump, it is difficult to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since September 11; Trump, in the past few months, has asserted even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch as well; currently, under the leadership of management and budget director, Russell Vought, much of the ability to appropriate government money has likewise shifted to the presidency, with the administration asserting the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and seeking to move the funds to other uses. It’s as if they’re enacting any laws, anyway; almost all bills must now be packed into spending packages, huge perennial essential comprehensive bills that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when these fail to be approved – and increasingly, they don’t – the government just shuts down. That is, big parts of the administration do – and it’s not clear how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been shut down all month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.
And so the issue of dominance of Congress can seem rather irrelevant. Why should U.S. citizens be concerned who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?
In what way ‘screw Trump’ rhetoric could assist the state of California’s Prop 50 succeed
And yet Proposition 50, the Golden State’s redistricting referendum that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is approved by voters in a special election next month, has seized the attention of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a delayed response to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time adopted dramatic partisan gerrymandering while large Democratic-controlled such as the Golden State, the Empire State and Washington create their maps via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by the left, that their political group is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide the GOP an five more positions in the state’s House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as Missouri and the Hoosier State. (The left in the Old Dominion are also following California’s example in seeking to redistrict.)
The state initiative seems probable to pass, as progressive voters respond with concern and anger to the president’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to check his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the move could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to change districts triggering a revenge pattern in which red states do additional to design their maps so as to foreclose any chance of opposition party success. Others have questioned the proposal on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is drawn in such a way that the result of the election is not in question, they say, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it means, necessarily, that the influence of dissenting views is suppressed, and that the process of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a healthy political system will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.
It is valuable taking each of these criticisms on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own districts in response, fails as a causal argument: it is illogical to say that the GOP will be made to act in undemocratic ways by the left’s actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of retaliation to change maps that secure permanent positions for themselves: they have been willing to do this for its own sake, in the complete lack of Democratic reciprocation, for a long time.
The second critique, in my view, is more substantive, expressing not just a strategic difference about how to confront the Republicans’ undemocratic turn, but a sort of sad desire for a different country than the one that the United States has become. It is accurate that in a more ideal situation – in the world that most the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be distasteful to our values, and not mandated by our situation. It is undesirable to pack and crack targeted demographics; it is not good for elected officials to select their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to impede the autocratic advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is capable to cause is sad; it is a sign of how far we have fallen from something more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only after the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can mourn what opposing it has made us.
If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that Prop 50’s five new blue representatives will be dispatched to the capital to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is subpoena power, and the ability to examine. Even in our era of stagnant government and legislative decline, it has made use of that authority to significant impact. In 2027, if Prop 50 is approved and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a body with the power to investigate the president, to televise their investigations into his actions and to compel members of his inner circle to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not something that any conservative would do.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US writer
